LOBO, JERONIMO (1593-1678), Jesuit missionary, was born in Lisbon, and entered the Order of Jesus at the age of 16. In 1621 he was ordered as a missionary to India, and in 1622 he arrived at Goa. With the intention of proceeding to Abyssinia, whose negus (emperor) Segued had been converted to Roman Catholicism by Pedro Paez, he left India in 1624. He disembarked on the coast of Mombasa, and attempted to reach his destination through the Galla country, but was forced to return. In 1625 he set out again, accompanied by Mendez, the patriarch of Ethiopia, and eight missionaries. The party landed on the coast of the Red sea, and Lobo settled in Abyssinia as superintendent of the missions in Tigre. He remained there until the death of Segued. Forced by persecution to leave the kingdom, in 1634 Lobo and his companions fell into the hands of the Turks at Massawa, who sent him to India to procure a ransom for his imprisoned fellow-missionaries. He obtained the ransom, but could not induce the Portuguese viceroy to send an armament against Abyssinia. He embarked for Portugal, and after he had been shipwrecked on the coast of Natal, and captured by pirates, arrived at Lisbon. He obtained no support, and in 1640 he re turned to India, and was elected rector, and afterwards provincial, of the Jesuits at Goa. He died in Lisbon on Jan. 29, 1678.
Lobo wrote an account of his travels in Portuguese, which appears never to have been printed, but is deposited in the monastery of St. Roque, Lisbon. Balthazar Telles made large use of the information therein in his Historia geral da Ethiopia a Alta (Coimbra, 166o), often erroneously attributed to Lobo (see Machado's Bibliotheca Lusitana). Lobo's own narrative was translated from a ms. copy into French in 1728 by the Abbe Joachim le Grand, under the title of Voyage historique d'Abissinie. In 5669 a translation by Sir Peter Wyche cf several passages from a ms. account of Lobo's travels was published by the Royal Society (translated in M. Thevenot's Relation des voyages in 1673). An English abridgment of Le Grand's edition by Dr. Johnson was published in 1735 (reprinted 1789). In a Memoire justificatif en rehabilitation des peres Pierre Paez et Jerome Lobo, Dr. C. T. Beke maintains against Bruce the accuracy of Lobo's state ments as to the source of the Abai branch of the Nile. See A. de Backer, Bibliotheque de la Compagnie de Jesus (ed. C. Sommervogel, iv., 1893).